Boeing Shifting 600 IT Jobs to St. Louis

ST. LOUIS (KMOX) – Boeing plans to move hundreds of information technology workers from the Pacific Northwest to St. Louis, the company intends to announce Monday.

The shift comes at the expense of Seattle, which will lose about 1,500 jobs through a combination of layoffs, attrition and relocations. The Seattle Times reports that most of the 600 or so new jobs in St. Louis will not be Seattle relocations; they’ll be local hires.

Those positions include: system engineers, applications developers and database administrators and are highly trained, well-paid nonunion workers with good medical and pension benefits.

Last November, the Hudson’s Bay Company, owner of Lord & Taylor, announced it will consolidate all of its IT jobs, totalling about 130 people, in downtown St. Louis. Wells Fargo Advisors has been relocating employees from Minnesota and Wall Street to the Gateway City. Monsanto recently announced a major expansion of its research facility in Chesterfield. Cloud service provider Contegix is running out of space on Tucker Blvd., less than half a year after moving in.

Why is Boeing making this move?

“They’ve told us how expensive it is to live and do business in the Puget Sound area. They have a hard time competing with Microsoft and other high-tech companies,” an employee told the Times. “They intend to move that work to lower-cost areas of the country.”

No announcement yet as to where Boeing intends to locate its St. Louis I.T. “Center of Excellence,” whether at its divisional headquarters at the Airport or, perhaps, making a mark on downtown.